| 04 Oct | 5 Links Every Poker Player NeedsPosted by PokerBarney on 3:39PM, 4th Oct 2006Permalink |  Send to a friend |  RSS feed |
Poker is all about pressing your skill, your edge, your competitive advantage. If you have an edge over your opponents, in the long run you will be a more profitable player than them. So, various tools have appeared helping online players do just that.
These tools include software add-ons like PokerOffice, PokerTracker etc, that track and record your play - then present you with lovely graphs showing your profits, losses, best hand, worst hands, best times of day and so on.
They also include odds calculators, automatic advice engines and entire e-courses devoted to instructing you step by step in the art of profitable poker. BUT.. the stuff I want to mention below brings a new level of detective-ness into your play. Behold, the power of the internet :)
Live Online Tournament Lists
These sites display a live, real-time list of tournaments that are starting across dozens of sites, all on one screen. You can sort and filter the tournaments that are shown, and can then click through to join the site.
It would be really cool if there was a link you could click to automatically register for the tournament.. but that would probably require having an account with the listing site - and them in turn knowing your poker site username/passwords. And that's not a good thing.
- Tournament Monitor
A fairly old and well established site that appears to offer up it's feed of tournaments for other webmasters to embed within their own sites. Very generous indeed. - Chrono Poker
A new kid on the block, has an impressive list of sites and a decent sorting mechanism. Very clean and easy to use. - Poker Listings
A large list of sites but main focussing on larger buy ins with larger payouts.
So something for everyone. As we all know, table selection in ring games is vitally important. I reckon MTT selection is just as important - so these sites let us shop around for the best deal.
Another suggestion for the owners of these sites - is there any way to show the results of recent tournaments that have finished? It would be great to give an idea of field sizes, duration, prizepools, payouts etc.
Playing Tracking And Statistics
The other field of tool that is a million times more beneficial is that of public player stats. The software applications listed above (like PokerOffice) will provide you tremendously detailed stats of your own play, but these websites will show some stats about your opponents!
- Sharkscope
Shows stats on SNG results on PokerStars. Draws lots of lovely graphs, but the free version only allows 5 searches per day. - The Poker DB
Shows stats for MTT results on PokerStars, PartyPoker, UltimateBet and Full Tilt. You have to register, but it's free and you can see recent cashes that players have made. - Tournament Reporter.com - now deceased, unfortunately.
These things are great. Especially Sharkscope, and especially while I've been hammering the SNGs on 'Stars. It's so cool to hit a final table and know that 5 of the other 8 players are fish! It's a shame you can only have 5 searches a day, but if you know what a proxy is, you may be able to get a few more. That's all I'm saying, since I don't want to be accused of hacking Sharkscope. Eeek!
Anyway.. now there's no excuse for not being able to find a good game, or not knowing that your opponent was a shark. Go get 'em!
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